[NYTr] Mex: Echeverria May Escape Trial for 1968 Student Massacre
 
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 14:49:15 -0400


Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
sent by Milt Shapiro (mexnews)

Reuters - Jul 12, 2007

Mexico ex-president may avoid massacre trial

A Mexican judge issued an injunction on Thursday that could prevent 
former President Luis Echeverria from facing trial for his alleged 
role in a 1968 massacre of leftist students.

Echeverria, 85, has been under house arrest since late last year 
after a Mexican court ordered him to be tried over the so-called 
Tlatelolco massacre.

Echeverria's lawyer Juan Velasquez told Reuters a federal judge had 
granted him a type of injunction commonly used in Mexico on the 
grounds that there was no case against him. The prosecuting judge has 
10 days to appeal.

Echeverria was interior minister when security forces stormed a 
student rally in a square in Mexico City's Tlatelolco district, 
killing 30-40 people, according to officials, or as many as 300, 
according to rights activists and witnesses.

Two years later, Echeverria became president.

The killings took place just days before the Olympic Games in the 
capital, as the government tried to quell weeks of what it saw as 
embarrassing demonstrations by students demanding democratic reforms 
in authoritarian Mexico.

Last July, a judge threw out a genocide charge against Echeverria, 
who was president from 1970 to 1976, because the statute of 
limitations had expired, but prosecutors appealed.

Former President Vicente Fox, in power from 2000-2006, appointed a 
special prosecutor to look into human rights violations from the 
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled for 71 years 
and crushed leftist student and guerrilla movements in a "dirty war" 
in the 1960s and '70s.

The report accused three former presidents, including Echeverria, of 
overseeing systematic violence including massacres, forced 
disappearances, systematic torture and genocide against dissenters.

Rights groups welcomed the report, which documents at least 436 
forced disappearances but criticized the government for failing to 
prosecute those held responsible.

Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited.
       
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